Moon Is Always Female

by Marge Piercy

the living by making jokes at corpses.

  For we were making sounds from our throats

  and lips to warn and encourage the helpless

  young long before schools were built

  to teach boys to obey and be bored and kill.

  I wake in a strange slack empty bed

  of a motel, shaking like dry leaves

  the wind rips loose, and in my head

  is bound a girl of twelve whose female

  organs all but the numb womb are being

  cut from her with a knife. Clitoridectomy,

  whatever Latin name you call it, in a quarter

  of the world girl children are so maimed

  and I think of her and I cannot stop.

  And I think of her and I cannot stop.

  If you are a woman you feel the knife in the words.

  If you are a man, then at age four or else

  at twelve you are seized and held down

  and your penis is cut off. You are left

  your testicles but they are sewed to your

  crotch. When your spouse buys you, you

  are torn or cut open so that your precious

  semen can be siphoned out, but of course

  you feel nothing. But pain. But pain.

  For the uses of men we have been butchered

  and crippled and shut up and carved open

  under the moon that swells and shines

  and shrinks again into nothingness, pregnant

  and then waning toward its little monthly

  death. The moon is always female but the sun

  is female only in lands where females

  are let into the sun to run and climb.

  A woman is screaming and I hear her.

  A woman is bleeding and I see her

  bleeding from the mouth, the womb, the breasts

  in a fountain of dark blood of dismal

  daily tedious sorrow quite palatable

  to the taste of the mighty and taken for granted

  that the bread of domesticity be baked

  of our flesh, that the hearth be built

  of our bones of animals kept for meat and milk,

  that we open and lie under and weep.

  I want to say over the names of my mothers

  like the stones of a path I am climbing

  rock by slippery rock into the mists.

  Never even at knife point have I wanted

  or been willing to be or become a man.

  I want only to be myself and free.

  I am waiting for the moon to rise. Here

  I squat, the whole country with its steel

  mills and its coal mines and its prisons

  at my back and the continent tilting

  up into mountains and torn by shining lakes

  all behind me on this scythe of straw,

  a sand bar cast on the ocean waves, and I

  wait for the moon to rise red and heavy

  in my eyes. Chilled, cranky, fearful

  in the dark I wait and I am all the time

  climbing slippery rocks in a mist while

  far below the waves crash in the sea caves;

  I am descending a stairway under the groaning

  sea while the black waters buffet me

  like rockweed to and fro.

  I have swum the upper waters leaping

  in dolphin’s skin for joy equally into the necessary

  air and the tumult of the powerful wave.

  I am entering the chambers I have visited.

  I have floated through them sleeping and sleep-

  walking and waking, drowning in passion

  festooned with green bladderwrack of misery.

  I have wandered these chambers in the rock

  where the moon freezes the air and all hair

  is black or silver. Now I will tell you

  what I have learned lying under the moon

  naked as women do: now I will tell you

  the changes of the high and lower moon.

  Out of necessity’s hard stones we suck

  what water we can and so we have survived,

  women born of women. There is knowing

  with the teeth as well as knowing with

  the tongue and knowing with the fingertips

  as well as knowing with words and with all

  the fine flickering hungers of the brain.

  Right to life

  SAILLE

  A woman is not a pear tree

  thrusting her fruit in mindless fecundity

  into the world. Even pear trees bear

  heavily one year and rest and grow the next.

  An orchard gone wild drops few warm rotting

  fruit in the grass but the trees stretch

  high and wiry gifting the birds forty

  feet up among inch long thorns

  broken atavistically from the smooth wood.

  A woman is not a basket you place

  your buns in to keep them warm. Not a brood

  hen you can slip duck eggs under.

  Not the purse holding the coins of your

  descendants till you spend them in wars.

  Not a bank where your genes gather interest

  and interesting mutations in the tainted

  rain, any more than you are.

  You plant corn and you harvest

  it to eat or sell. You put the lamb

  in the pasture to fatten and haul it in

  to butcher for chops. You slice

  the mountain in two for a road and gouge

  the high plains for coal and the waters

  run muddy for miles and years.

  Fish die but you do not call them yours

  unless you wished to eat them.

  Now you legislate mineral rights in a woman.

  You lay claim to her pastures for grazing,

  fields for growing babies like iceberg

  lettuce. You value children so dearly

  that none ever go hungry, none weep

  with no one to tend them when mothers

  work, none lack fresh fruit,

  none chew lead or cough to death and your

  foster homes are empty. Every noon the best

  restaurants serve poor children steaks.

  At this moment at nine o’clock a partera

  is performing a table top abortion on an

  unwed mother in Texas who can’t get Medicaid

  any longer. In five days she will die

  of tetanus and her little daughter will cry

  and be taken away. Next door a husband

  and wife are sticking pins in the son

  they did not want. They will explain

  for hours how wicked he is,

  how he wants discipline.

  We are all born of woman, in the rose

  of the womb we suckled our mother’s blood

  and every baby born has a right to love

  like a seedling to sun. Every baby born

  unloved, unwanted is a bill that will come

  due in twenty years with interest, an anger

  that must find a target, a pain that will

  beget pain. A decade downstream a child

  screams, a woman falls, a synagogue is torched,

  a firing squad is summoned, a button

  is pushed and the world burns.

  I will choose what enters me, what becomes

  flesh of my flesh. Without choice, no politics,

  no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield,

  not your uranium mine, not your calf

  for fattening, not your cow for milking.

  You may not use me as your factory.

  Priests and legislators do not hold

  shares in my womb or my mind.

  This is my body. If I give it to you

  I want it back. My life

  is a non-negotiable demand.

  May apple

  UATH

  Hawthorn: spines long as my li
ttle finger

  that glint in the sun before the leaves come out,

  small white flowers like the wild rose

  and fruits people don’t eat. Virginity.

  Not the hymen it took a week to drill through.

  All at sixteen I could concentrate on

  was what happened how and would it soon

  while my mind turned into chewed bubblegum

  and my periods racked me like earthquakes.

  No, virginity in the old sense of a woman

  unmated and not mating: solitude. A state

  I have passed in and out of, the nature

  of the dreaming mind nobody courts.

  State of my cats when they are neither

  in heat nor pregnant but predators, players,

  brooding elegant gods. Sitting paws folded

  and facing they blink courteously

  and contemplate mathematical laws.

  Eyes alter us by their observant gaze.

  We are never the same after someone

  has first loved us. The self the other

  sees hangs in the mirror at least part time.

  The innocence lost is living for myself,

  ignorant as a wild hawthorn how to allure,

  flatter, please and in what light arrange

  the hair and limbs like a bouquet of white

  flowers, dark twigs snipped off the tree.

  Alone I am clear as clean ice.

  I sleep short hours, stop cooking sauces,

  and every day like a desert monk I contemplate

  death in each apple core and woodash.

  Alone I am twelve years old and eighty.

  Alone I am sexless as a pine board.

  Alone I am invisible to myself as carbon

  dioxide. I touch myself often and then less

  as my dreams darken into stained glass allegories.

  Alone I find old fears preserved like hiking

  boots at the bottom of the closet in a box,

  my feet having shaped them just perfect to fit

  and eight years later I set off in them to climb.

  I become nocturnal. My eyes glow in the dark.

  The moist rich parts of me contract underground

  into tubers. What stands up still is strong

  but crotchety, the village witch people come to

  with savory troubles, all ears and teeth.

  Shadows of the burning

  DUIR

  Oak burns steady and hot and long

  and fires of oak are traditional tonight

  but we light a fire of pitch pine

  which burns well enough in the salt wind

  whistling while ragged flames lick the dark

  casting our shadows high as the dunes.

  Come into the fire and catch,

  come in, come in. Fire that burns

  and leaves entire, the silver flame

  of the moon, trembling mercury laying

  on the waves a highway to the abyss,

  the full roaring furnace of the sun at zenith

  of the year and potency, midsummer’s eve.

  Come dance in the fire, come in.

  This is the briefest night and just

  under the ocean the fires of the sun

  roll toward us. Already your skin is dark,

  already your wiry curls are tipped with gold

  and my black hair begins to redden.

  How often I have leapt into that fire,

  how often burned like a torch, my hair

  streaming sparks, and wakened to weep

  ashes. I have said, love is a downer we take,

  love is a habit like sucking on death tit cigarettes,

  love is a bastard art. Instead of painting

  or composing, we compose a beloved.

  When you love for a living, I have said,

  you’re doomed to early retirement without benefits.

  For women have died and worms have eaten them

  and just for love. Love of the wrong man or

  the right. Death from abortion, from the first

  child or the eighteenth, death at the stake

  for loving a woman or freedom or the wrong

  deity. Death at the open end of a gun

  from a jealous man, a vengeful man,

  Othello’s fingers, Henry’s ax.

  It is romance I loathe, the swooning moon

  of June which croons to the tune of every goon.

  Venus on the half shell without the reek

  of seaweed preferred to Artemis of the rows

  of breasts like a sow and the bow

  ready in her hand that kills and the herbs

  that save in childbirth.

  Ah, my name hung once like a can

  on an ink stained girl blue as skim milk

  lumpy with elbows, spiky with scruples,

  who knelt in a tower raised of Shelley’s bones

  praying my demon lover asceticism

  to grant one icy vision.

  I found my body in the arms of lovers

  and woke in the flesh alive, astounded

  like a corpse sitting up in a judgment

  day painting. My own five hound senses

  turned on me, chased me, tore me

  head from trunk. Thumb and liver

  and jaw on the bloody hillside

  twanged like frogs in the night I am alive!

  A succession of lovers like a committee

  of Congress in slow motion put me back

  together, a thumb under my ear, the ear

  in an armpit, the head sprouting feet.

  Kaleidoscope where glass sparks pierced

  my eyes, in love’s funhouse I was hung

  a mirror of flesh reflecting flaccid ideas

  of men scouting their mothers through my womb,

  a labyrinth of years in other

  people’s thoroughly furnished rooms.

  I built myself like a house a poor family

  puts up in the country: first the foundation

  under a tarred flat roof like a dugout,

  then the well in the spring and you get

  electricity connected and maybe the next

  fall you seal in two rooms and add some

  plumbing but all the time you’re living

  there constructing your way out of a slum.

  Yet for whom is this built if not to be shared

  with the quick steps and low voice of love?

  I cherish friendship and loving that starts

  in liking but the body is the church

  where I praise and bless and am blessed.

  My strength and my weakness are twins

  in the same womb, mirrored dancers under

  water, the dark and light side of the moon.

  I know how truly my seasons have turned

  cold and hot

  around that lion-bodied sun.

  Come step into the fire, come in,

  come in, dance in the flames of the festival

  of the strongest sun at the mountain top

  of the year when the wheel starts down.

  Dance through me as I through you.

  Here in the heart of fire in the caves

  of the ancient body we are aligned

  with the stars wheeling, the midges swarming

  in the humid air like a nebula, with the clams

  who drink the tide and the heartwood clock

  of the oak and the astronomical clock

  in the blood thundering through the great heart

  of the albatross. Our cells are burning

  each a little furnace powered by the sun

  and the moon pulls the sea of our blood.

  This night the sun and moon dance

  and you and I dance in the fire of which

  we are the logs, the matches and the flames.

  The sabbath of mutual respect

  TINNE

  In the natural year come two thanksgiv
ings,

  the harvest of summer and the harvest of fall,

  two times when we eat and drink and remember our dead

  under the golden basin of the moon of plenty.

  Abundance, Habondia, food for the winter,

  too much now and survival later. After

  the plant bears, it dies into seed.

  The blowing grasses nourish us, wheat

  and corn and rye, millet and rice, oat

  and barley and buckwheat, all the serviceable

  grasses of the pasture that the cow grazes,

  the lamb, the horse, the goat; the grasses

  that quicken into meat and milk and cheese,

  the humble necessary mute vegetable bees,

  the armies of the grasses waving their

  golden banners of ripe seed.

  The sensual

  round fruit that gleams with the sun

  stored in its sweetness.

  The succulent

  ephemera of the summer garden, bloodwarm

  tomatoes, tender small squash, crisp

  beans, the milky corn, the red peppers

  exploding like roman candles in the mouth.

  We praise abundance by eating of it,

  reveling in choice on a table set with roses

  and lilies and phlox, zucchini and lettuce

  and eggplant before the long winter

  of root crops.

  Fertility and choice:

  every row dug in spring means weeks

  of labor. Plant too much and the seedlings

  choke in weeds as the warm rain soaks them.

  The goddess of abundance Habondia is also

  the spirit of labor and choice.

  In another

  life, dear sister, I too would bear six fat

  children. In another life, my sister, I too

  would love another woman and raise one child

  together as if that pushed from both our wombs.

  In another life, sister, I too would dwell

  solitary and splendid as a lighthouse on the rocks

  or be born to mate for life like the faithful goose.

  Praise all our choices. Praise any woman

  who chooses, and make safe her choice.

  Habondia, Artemis, Cybele, Demeter, Ishtar,

  Aphrodite, Au Set, Hecate, Themis, Lilith,

  Thea, Gaia, Bridgit, The Great Grandmother of Us